Like most programmers writing non-trivial applications, I’ve piled up a lot of utility functions over the years. Most of them are simple and effective. They are short and get their job done. You or someone you know has probably written these functions, but maybe not in AS3. So today I’m going to share a few utility functions for Objects in AS3.
Posts Tagged objects
Map Performance
Nov 23
I recently received an e-mail from Dmitry Zhelnin (translation) with a test he did concerning the speed of a couple ways to get a value for a key, which I like to call a map and Wikipedia likes to call an associative array. I’d been meaning to do a similar test for a while now and, guess what, I finally have! UPDATE: fixed miss test for fixed-size Vectors.
Loop Speed
Oct 7
AS3 gives you a good number of potential ways you can loop over collections. When Flash Player 10 first came out, I went ahead and tested out the new Vector class in a variety of ways. One of them was to pit it against the collections available in Flash Player 9: Array, Object, Dictionary, ByteArray, and even BitmapData. Below I’ll show you my test and discuss its results.
With Blocks
Aug 28
While plainly documented by Adobe in the Flash 10 AS3 Docs, it seems as though few programmers know about the with statement. I don’t use them much personally, but when a coworker came across one in my code recently and was puzzled, I figured I would write a quick article to cover their usage.
Welcome to the second part of this series on dynamic access. Last time we covered indexing arrays and vectors. This time we’ll talk about dynamic classes and plain objects. These are definitely something to watch out for when writing performance-critical code.
Many classes in AS3 are dynamic, meaning that you can add and remove their fields at runtime. This is powerful, but extraordinarily slow. This series will cover some common ways you might be inadvertently using dynamic access or using it too much. This will help you make your code faster. In the first installation of the series, I’m going to talk about the simple act of indexing an array or vector.
Indexing Anything
Aug 3
Indexing is a little bit special in ECMAScript languages like AS3, AS2, and JavaScript. MXMLC will gleefully let you index just about anything, even if there isn’t a chance it’ll work.
